88 to imagine that Ross, that almost clair- voyant judge of people, put Levin in Nicholas's place because he visualized Levin as a strong leader for his- Ross's-company after his death. Levin was turned inward; he was opaque; and he was small-not just in stature but in effectiveness. He might be well suited to brewing transactions with Aboodi, and, especially, to immersing himself in the intricacies of the technological future- as in the two-way electronic superhigh- way that Time Warner is developing, and in its two-and-a-ha1{-billion-dollar deal with U S West, a regional Bell tele- phone company. But he was altogether unequipped for the task of relating to the executives of Time Warner, with all their disparate and sometimes adversarial agendas, in ways that wowd inspire trust, loyalty, and a passion to follow his lead. Only a couple of months after Ross's death, Seagram's quietly began accumu- lating Time Warner stock, and eventu- ally disclosed that its intent was to take its ownership up to fifteen per cent. While Seagram's presented the move as a friendly one, it had not alerted Time Warner to its purchases until they passed the obligatory five-per-cent mark-a silence that in itself suggested a move less than friendly. Moreover, the move was said to have been fuelled by the avid interest of Seagram's president, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., in becoming ac- tively involved in the enter- tainment business-and, perhaps) in having his friend Michael Ovitz replace Levin as chairman and C.E.O. "I see your fine Medici hand at work here," one knowing friend wrote in a note to Ovitz. Soon after Seagram's ownership was disclosed, Levin began discussing possible anti- takeover provisions with his advIsers. That this threat of an eventual change in command would have dis- pleased Ross is far from clear. He had so diligently promoted the ideology that the company he headed and he were in- separable-joined in a kind of fixed symbiosis ("Steve Ross is W.C.I.," Spielberg had once declared)-that it was difficult to imagine his really want- ing anyone else to have Time Warner. Binding the company to him had always been his objective-more than insuring Its continuation without him. Whereas company founders intent on building an entity to outlast them regard the selec- tion and grooming of a successor as one of their most important goals, Ross took care for decades to avoid any true con- tenders-and may well, in his view, have continued to do that to the very last. Levin had a capacious mind and a fasci- nation with technology, but, that said, his persona-or lack of one-made him a most implausible successor to Ross, al- most certain to be dwarfed by Ross's shadow. Moreover, Ross's blessing of Levin was tentative and limited (with fingers crossed?)-for, had he fully blessed Levin, there would have been an orderly and seemly transition, and Levin would not have felt impelled to seize control as he wtimately did. At the time of the merger, some people, specwating that the merger itself reflected Ross's coming to terms with his mortality, had referred to its succession provisions as his "living will." But when I mentioned this to Ross-who was so controlled that his countenance rarely divulged anything he didn't intend it to-he had started noticeably, and looked as though he'd been slapped. He forcefully denied that it was a "living will," and talked about how there was nothing like having a six-year-old to keep you going, and how he intended to be there for many years to come. If he only had, Ross loyalists say, he, and he alone, might have made the un- wieldy, fractious merger work. "Steve was the god- father," Ralph Peterson, of Warner Brothers, declared, and, alluding to a feud be- tween the heads of Warner Brothers and ofHBO which began at the time of the merger and has only gath- ered heat since, he added, "He wowd have brought Bob Daly and Michael Fuchs into a room together." Perhaps. In assessing the keys to his suc- cess, Ross tended to downplay the intri- cacies of his deal-making, informed by his mathematical wizardry. In what proved to be our final intetview, in Sep- tember of1991, Ross had acknowledged that he could indeed multiply a three- digit number by another three-digit number in his head. "Numbers speak to me," he said. "But very little of this is about numbers. It's about people, re- ally-realizing what they want." He certainly excelled at that, I saId. Whereupon he shot me a quick, faindy gunlet-eyed look and added, "And that's not bad." R oss was intent on never being found out. Those who knew him well over many years, including family mem- bers, agreed that he rarely, if ever, let the impenetrable façade slip; that he was frightened by the prospect of exposure; that it was therefore easier for him to have relationships with legions of his ex- tended "family" -which involved, on his part, a great deal of doing and the receipt of an enormous and enormously needed amount of approbation but little genuine emotional contact-than with his real family; and that he was truly intimate with no one. It was a central paradox of Ross's life that the man with thousands of friends had none. Many people wondered what the specific secrets were that Ross was so ea- ger to protect. While there was an abun- dance of secrets as the years wore on, his guardedness was so much his emotional style that one suspected, more, that it might have come from a general dIscrep- ancy between the person he felt himself to be and the image he projected to the world. Whatever he did not want to re- veal to others, it seemed he himself did not want to dwell on it, either: family members emphasized the fact that he simply could not be alone; there was then no distraction from himseJL and, perhaps, no sense of himself: in the ab- sence of others' responsiveness. His un- ease, in any event, was profound. He was also someone who was con- tinually creating and re-creating himself; it emerged that at the very start he had cast aside family connections, much as he later cast aside outworn sets of friends. Mark and Toni were amazed to discover after his death that he had had seven aunts and uncles whose existence he had never mentioned, even to their mother. When they questioned him about his family, he had always refused to discuss it. "I don't want to say my fa- ther 'abandoned' his family," Toni Ross said, "but it is certainly true that he dis- connected himself from them." The movies that Ross had loved so much when he was growing up, and watched so often in his later life, were redolent with old-fashioned values and virtues. "My father took me to see the John Wayne movie 'True Grit' when I was nine, and when I was twelve he took